Flagged for Facebook use!

By Kaityln StockerPennsbury High School

Thursday

Mar 31, 2011 at 12:01 AMMar 31, 2011 at 11:45 AM

THE FOLLOWING STORY WAS AN APRIL FOOL's JOKE.

The teen reality section has a tradition of publishing April Fool's jokes around April 1 each year. While there are elements of truth to this story -- yes, colleges and future employers pay attention to what teenagers post on Facebook -- there is no such group as APFL (short for April Fool's), and schools certainly do NOT care about things like typing in all caps, using too many emoticons, how many friends you have or how much time you spend on games such as Farmville. The purpose of the story was to take a real issue and exaggerate to what we thought were ridiculous extremes. Our intention was to fool some of our readers, not to panic them.

In next week's issue of reality (April 7), we will seriously address the issue of Facebook use and what effect it can have on students' futures.

Now, here's our April Fool's story as it originally ran in Thursday's reality section:

Colleges are now revoking acceptances, scholarships over common Facebook activity.

It's no secret that colleges are picky when it comes to admittance. We teenagers need to be almost flawless to get into any competitive school - and even then, it's a crapshoot.

But what so many kids don't know is that colleges are looking at more than your transcripts when deciding whether or not you get to go to your dream school.

April Foster, a straight-A honors student all through high school, had been accepted to Franklin Roberts College in Connecticut with a partial scholarship.

As she put it, "I was so excited. F-R was literally my top school, and my first acceptance letter was from them, offering me a scholarship."

But April's excitement was short-lived, as the Wrightstown resident soon received a second letter from Franklin Roberts telling her that, due to information that had been gathered from her Facebook page via an independent consulting firm, her admittance was being revoked.

"I couldn't believe it!" April said. "I didn't think colleges could even look at my Facebook - and I didn't have anything bad on there anyway!"

On further research, April found out that colleges across the country are consulting with a company called Academic Profiling Facebook Lifestyles (APFL), a Kansas-based organization that assesses prospective students' Facebook pages.

April's case isn't the only one. The APFL is gathering data from the Facebooks of kids as young as 12 and 13 years old.

Gill E. Bell, a profiler for the APFL, told me in a telephone interview that "colleges are interested in students' Facebook pages because it is a forum where teenagers often display what they manage to hide in the application process - things colleges have a right to know."

He said that the organization gains access to our Facebooks by hiring other teenagers to pose as "friends" to people of interest; they then, of course, have complete access to our Facebook profiles.

"Colleges are especially interested in chat-speak and cursing," Bell told me. "They want to see that students admitted to their school speak intelligently outside of the classroom, as well as within it."

He also expressed extreme disdain for the use of emoticons, calling them "juvenile and entirely unnecessary."

Bell said his company is even monitoring our time spent on Facebook for prospective colleges. If you're on Facebook more than 10 hours a week, you're at risk.

Also, all you Farmville junkies out there better watch out: Colleges are seriously looking at the amount of time spent on online games.

Bell said there is a list of 10 major "Facebook Offenses" (see chart), and that if any potential student is guilty of three or more, they're automatically out.

When I told him about April's story, Bell seemed surprised that she was told why her admission was being revoked at all.

"Usually, colleges make sure they have consulted with us before they make a decision at all," he told me. "It's rare that they would tell a student it was because of information from the APFL."

I started poking around the Internet to find out what people were saying about the APFL. What I found was entire web pages designated to it, with thousands of teenagers and their parents rallying against the invasion of their privacy. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg commented on the issue.

"This (APFL) is wrong and in blatant disregard to people's rights to privacy," he wrote. "Facebook was intended to make the world more open and connected. How can it do that when kids are constantly paranoid about being censored?"

I have to agree with Mark; there's nothing ethical about what the APFL is doing.

An anonymous college director of admissions addressed the issue of ethics in regard to using the APFL, saying there were some concerns, but she felt it was a "necessary evil to weed out undesirable students in the ultra-competitive world of secondary education."

I'm not sure I can agree with her on the "necessary evil" thing.

Just ask April, who now has no idea what she's going to do.

"After Franklin Roberts rejected me, I got a string of rejection letters from every other school I wanted to go to. What am I supposed to do now?"

Indeed, what is she going to do now? What are the rest of us going to do, now that the simplest things can jeopardize our college chances?

The best advice I can give you, apart from deleting your Facebook, is to set all your privacy settings to the most secure level, and to go through your friends and make sure you personally know all of them.

Prospective college students and their families concerned about how their Facebook activity will affect their chances of admission can share their fears at backtalk@phillyBurbs.com.

For more information on APFL, click here.

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